How Men Used to Eat: The Playboy Gourmet

Imagine our delight when we found this early-'60s gem under our stacks at home, on the heels of Chris Jones' comprehensive Hugh Hefner profile, no less. The Playboy Gourmet Cookbook, published in 1961 and sold in hardcover at the time for $12.50, features scores of recipes prepared by the magazine's food and drink editor Thomas Mario, with an introduction written by Hefner himself:

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Decades of marination in world-wide gourmandaise, it would seem, have ripened his erstwhile nodding acquaintance with matters gustatory into a deep and rewarding association; he has learned to delight in and insist on the best in food and drink.

Too true, Hef, and well-spoken from a man who was thirty-five when the book came out and who now takes most of his meals in bed, placing his orders like this:

Lately, he has been calling down for the number 6: "A BLT," he says. "With chips, milk, applesauce. And a blond." In the kitchen, there are photographs of each of his trays so that they can be replicated exactly each time out. The chips on the side are carefully selected by the chefs, fully formed and unbroken. (If Hefner has crackers with his soup, they must all be uniformly white and sharp-cornered.) Today's blond is similarly flawless, twenty-six-year-old Crystal Harris, a former Playmate who, only a few weeks ago, on New Year's Eve, became the third Mrs. Hefner.

But things have changed in fifty or so years. Hugh Hefner can still order blonds to his bed, but he probably can't eat most of the things in this cookbook, and for many fo them, he wouldn't want to. Today, you can really only read this book for its rich, calorie-laden dishes — with headlines to match from editors who perhaps likened themselves to poets. A sampler of their table of contents:

"Gourmet Flapjacks for the Gentleman Griddler"

"Happy Hors d'Oeuvres! Whetting Whistles with Toothsome Tidbits"

"Café Olé: Paean to a Bean and Its Aromatic Essence"

"Saturnalian Sweets: Fittingly Flamboyant Finales, Laced with Liquor"

"Charcoalmanship: Cooking on the Outside"

"The Beauties of the Bubbly: Champagne — The Effervescent Emblem of Liquid Luxury"

That doesn't cover half of them, and no, we did not make them up. Among the recipes that were probably lauded in 1961 and that you would never find yourself eating now for fear of having a coronary or just because we're a little more comfortable with being simpler these days...

"Crostini of Ham"

"Hamburgers Tempura"

"Venison Chops, Chestnuts Espagnole"

"Chicken Livers with Apple Calvados"

"Lamb Chops, Fritto Misto"

"Poached Halibut Fondue"

'"Shad Roe with Almonds"

"Grasshopper Sauce"

"Chicken Mousse with Pistachios"

"Tournedos with Foie Gras"

"Frogs Legs Poulette"

Thankfully, the book does endorse grinding your own meat, making your own pancakes, and Swedish cooking, but they don't save it from being an almost laughable look at the heavy, overwhelmingly French cooking that was once the bread and butter (literally) of chefs around the world. That this large-format, 320-page beast of a guide, packed with detailed instructions, essays, etiquette suggestions, doesn't even have room for any of the real reasons anyone reads Playboy (regardless of what they may tell you), is somewhat disheartening, too, given that Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe all appeared in the magazine the year before. The most you'll get is a few of these sprinkled through the pages:

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Even so, the book serves as a window to a time still much-idealized, where kitchen-savvy men could eye-fk the hell out of a pretty woman before taking her back to his place to, you know, impress her with his culinary acumen. A tip from page 158:

Every drink must be a toast. It isn't necessarily a talk-toast. Usually a toast is stimulated by a mere meeting of the eyes. You catch a girl's glance as her eyes turn toward yours and the you both lift your glasses of aquavit and bottoms up.

Given this information, it's not much of a stretch to say Hef and Mario are at least partially responsible for the teasing season five finale of Mad Men:

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